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Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

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Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#41

Post by jdthedisciple »

lorean_victor wrote: post #38
jdthedisciple wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I've never understood this cry for "decentralization for everything" coming from this tiny bubble of nerds. Nobody in the real world cares about it even one bit. The only thing people out there actually want is CONVENIENCE and USABILITY . When will the nerds understand?

You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything discussed on these forums should be exclusively about whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?). Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.

Yo don't take my comment in bad faith, I was being tongue-in-cheek sarcastic.

Obviously "we" here on HN care about the idea itself/tech ...

Was just saying things will likely never even begin to rival the Twitters and Instagrams out there contrary to what some utopists among us tend to think...

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#42

Post by lorean_victor »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #41
lorean_victor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right I'm sorry. I wasn't notified that anything discussed on these forums should be exclusively about whatever "the real world" cares about at least one bit (preferably 8 bits or more I guess?). Ah the nerds, when will we understand, indeed.

Yo don't take my comment in bad faith, I was being tongue-in-cheek sarcastic. Obviously "we" here on HN care about the idea itself/tech ... Was just saying things will likely never even begin to rival the Twitters and Instagrams out there contrary to what some utopists among us tend to think...

no worries, I have worked as a product manager for a few products that "the real world" seems to care about, and I fully understand your sentiment. that's even why I've dedicated the last segment of the post to basically "who cares?" (I suspect some "real people" might since they can get everything in one place instead of having to follow people in 6 different places, but not sure how strong of an incentive that is).

also having had the privilege of observing a few products that have found "real world" usage, I actually believe that "nerdy passion" is key, though of course without considering USABILITY and CONVENIENCE (as you've put it), it wouldn't get far.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#43

Post by PaulHoule »

api wrote: post #25
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

It's difficult to impossible to implement bulk level social media algorithms on decentralized networks because no single node has all the data and views/interactions are largely private. This is a feature and is perhaps an even more compelling reason to go federated or decentralized than the other autonomy and privacy related reasons. Social media algorithms are cultural lobotomy machines. A great example of technolo…

I make algorithms that filter RSS feeds and other social media content. You don't need a global view of the system at all to do this, you just need a point of view. That is, if you have a few thousand posts and a thumbs up/thumbs down judgement you can train an ML model that will predict those judgements.

With about two days looking at toots I could make a model that shows you nothing but angry toots about politics or one that removes angry toots (could take down that keyword filter that means I never hear if somebody is having trouble with the transmission in their truck or that Transnistria got invaded.)

The main reason I haven't developed a social media (as opposed to product/service) sentiment model like this is that it would involve looking at a few thousand angry toots. (1) The reason I want it is that I don't want to read those toots, (2) it would cause me great suffering to look at those toots. Social media moderators at companies like Facebook have been traumatized, it's no joke.

If it was my social network, I'd use that filter to put a brake on selfish angry memes spreading so that the pain of one person reading angry toots gives relief to so many more.

I have a model that predicts the probability of a headline getting a lot of comments relative to votes on hacker news: some high scoring headlines in my RSS reader right now are:

Why do women commit far less crime than men?

Study suggests anti-Black racism may account for conservatives' negative reactions to jobs requiring DEI statements

Checking a bag will cost you more on United Airlines, which is copying a similar move by American

Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (2022)

Three of those are clickbait, the last one is a good HN submission. A social media sentiment model can give a larger algorithm a "superego". There are other ways to pursue engagement other than selfish angry memes.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#44

Post by PaulHoule »

logicprog wrote: post #3

Pull not being a good model of two way communications is going to be the major blocker here in my opinion. It's going to mean that people are only going to see comments and reactions on their posts or comments from people they already subscribe to, because their RSS reader would have no possible way of knowing if anyone outside of that list commented, since you can't get notified of content sources you don't already…

Note RSS is an ill-defined polling protocol. The server emits an RSS file which has the top N pieces of content.

All you can do is poll it at a greater or less frequency and hope you don't underpoll or overpoll. (I can easily fetch the RSS feed for an independent blog 1000 times for every time I fetch an HTML page, but should I? What if I wanted to follow 1000 independent blogs?)

With ActivityPub on the other hand you can ask for all updates since the last time you checked so there is a well-defined strategy to keep synced.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#45

Post by iteratethis »

kornhole wrote: post #22
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

To be honest, I don't really think there's much value in social networks for humanity. In theory, they can do something good and some people see only positive effects, but it seems that the combination of pseudo-anonymity with algorithms inevitably brings out the worst in people.

Social media is the most important counter measure to propaganda. Before social media, we had a one way stream of information from the media outlets without much opportunity to question, discuss, and debunk. The fediverse resolves the problem of centrally controlled algorithms and censorship that manipulate people's speech depending on the moderation rules of individual instances.

Not really.

First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda?

Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than traditional social networks. It's basically a collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal because somebody will be "triggered".

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#46

Post by iteratethis »

I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world.

However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has interesting ideas in this area. For example, you can say to always block sexual content, show a warning, or just show it. To each their own.

With that in place, a centralized network is superior as it tends to have excellent discovery, search, no weird syncing issues, it's centrally monetized, doesn't depend on lots of volunteer effort and the track record in keeping content online is far better compared to alternatives. That's a lot of benefits to consider.

The only real downside is the algorithms that dictate reach and how they are gamed.

Federated social media is a really bad idea. Having separate instances is fine if you want to carve out a community, it's the federation part that sucks.

It's very resource hungry and still can't manage to properly sync up content, likes and replies.

Discovery and search is very hard which beats the entire point of a social network, which is to find people and content.

Reliability is low as any volunteer may quit on a whim, taking down your content.

Instance moderation is very heavy-handed in that it not only dictates instance rules (which is fine) it also dictates federation. Which means you have no say in which outside content or people you can see. The solution is the dreaded "switch instance". Social media users don't know what an instance is, you're not getting it.

The culture on the Fediverse is: connect nobody. Extreme safetyism.

The lack of some type of ranked algorithm is a problem, not a solution.

Reach is a problem. Bigger accounts, institutions, companies, news, sports...get no reach on the Fediverse.

Bottom line: fully centralized social media or fully isolated ones. Federated is the worst of both worlds.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#47

Post by myaccountonhn »

iteratethis wrote: post #46

I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world. However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has…

I think there is a huge issue with centralized social media. Why are unelected tycoons in the US dictating what the rest of the world should be allowed to see? What happens when they neglect languages and regions? It can go horribly wrong: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb....

Decentralized social media gives us a chance to take back control.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#48

Post by lorean_victor »

iteratethis wrote: post #46

I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world. However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has…

I see your points (though I don't fully agree). Most of these relate to a "central search and discovery service". this doesn't need to be coupled with the rest of the network functionalities (posting content or interacting with content), which I personally believe is better fully distributed (for similar reasons to what you mentioned). We've done this for the internet as a whole (anyone can bring up a website on their own, search engines will discover and index it, but the search engine space is as centralised as it gets), so I believe we can do it for more "social" content as well.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#49

Post by lxgr »

lorean_victor wrote: post #33
lxgr wrote: post #28

> In the pull-based system, more work in the end is required (when should Alice query Bob? Also Bob needs to respond to the query, though thats super easy as it is static responses), but the work is better distributed, lowering the maximum amount of work someone has to do (in this case, Bob). I don't see how that follows. Yes, work is better distributed temporally (since consumers hopefully poll the feed in a randomi…

yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though. to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your aut…

Still, what's the benefit of that? If peak load is a concern, a push-based system can stagger out individual post deliveries just as well, and push gives the producer much more control over load management. If that's not enough, several posts can be combined too.

In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers' refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll have lots of wasted cycles fetching nothing new on top of that.

I do agree that pull is simpler to implement (since subscription management is handled entirely on the consumer side, requiring no network protocol and server-side state for it), but in terms of network calls, it's strictly worse.

Re: Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?

#50

Post by lorean_victor »

lxgr wrote: post #49
lorean_victor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes it is a federated system by design. doesn't mean it is not a limitation though. to give you an example: in case of email, though it is not that difficult to host your own server (and even if you are a small startup you'll most probably do so without much effort), in the end basically Google decides on "who is an accepted participant in the network". If Google deems you spam, you are spam. If Google deems your aut…

Still, what's the benefit of that? If peak load is a concern, a push-based system can stagger out individual post deliveries just as well, and push gives the producer much more control over load management. If that's not enough, several posts can be combined too. In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers' refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll have lots of wasted cycles fetching not…

the system doesn't need to be completely pull-based though. I don't even think most modern RSS readers are fully pull-based, don't they support WebSub?

the main point is to separate publishing and distribution, making publishing far more accessible and decentralised. for that to happen, I guess, from a publisher's point of view, the system should be pull based. of course we can have hubs and relays to add pull-based mechanisms to ease the load of the system.

p.s. even in that case, strictly speaking, yes a pull-based system, or even a hybrid one, will always require more work than a fully push-based system.

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